About

About Arian

I am a well seasoned practitioner and teacher in the field of mindfulness and attention training. For a time, in the previous century, I was a Tibetan Buddhist nun ordained in the Gelugpa tradition and lived in monasteries and women's hermitages throughout Asia, Europe and the USA. For 39 years I have been exploring and wondering about mindfulness, attention training and meditation and witnessing its growth and demand in the workplace and western world. The transformation from it's eastern roots has shaped a narrative that even the Buddha would find intriguing as well as questionable if he were alive today.

My formative years have helped me to observe and critique mindfulness and it asks that we bring an even more radical approach to how we pay attention today.Our consumerist culture encourages us to manage stress and pain while increasing our efficiency at making money to possess more things. In sanskrit the word Buddha means to be awake. Those of us who will come to learn mindfulness are some of the luckiest people on the planet. Access to education, income, travel and restaurants, clothes and a smart phone. They’re somewhere on top of the food-chain of great fortune. Which means they're up near the top of the food chain of consumption and devastation which is driving the natural world to the edge.

Mindfulness. Paying attention on purpose is the culmination of a more empathetic, equitable, environmental and social world.

What does mindfulness ask of us?What does paying attention with purpose ask of us?What does being awake ask of us?

One day, someone half or a third our age will come to you with two questions: The first will be something like, ‘When you were my age, did you know what was happening to the world?’ The fairest answer has to be: ‘Some did and some didn’t. Anyone who wanted to know could have known, yes.’ The second question will be, ‘So what did you do?

— Stephen Jenkinson

Over time I have fused a history with a diverse background in the wisdom traditions of Buddhism, depth-psychology and western and eastern cross-cultural perspectives.This alchemy has supported me over the years as a practitioner in Traditional Chinese Medicine, body work, spiritual and soul-centred counselling, mindfulness, emotional intelligence and meditation and coaching.

When I am not teaching in the workplace, I walk my days wondering the mysteries of what it means to live deeply and die well for which most of us have forgotten. We're not suppose to feel bad about having forgotten, we're suppose to feel more.If you like, read more about this on my other website: Dying To Be Humanwww.dyingtobehuman.com.au